Last week, I noticed that Grain.com had transferred from Tucows to GoDaddy, and the domain name is now registered using GoDaddy’s Whois privacy service. The previous owner of Grain.com was Digimedia, a company that owns a portfolio of exceptional domain name assets.
When I saw the domain transfer and registrant change in my DomainTools Domain Monitor alert email, I tweeted about the sale and guessed who might have acquired Grain.com:
Two of my favorite things are domain names and the Boston Red Sox (with the exception of this terrible, horrible season). My wife and I have a Red Sox season ticket package, and we get to Fenway Park as often as possible.
I was scrolling through Facebook earlier today, and I saw a highlight from the Red Sox game against the Miami Marlins. The highlight was for a Rafael Devers home run, but that is not what caught my attention. Have a look:
This morning, I read a TechCrunch article announcing a new e-bike subscription service called Dance that was founded by the founders of Soundcloud. The company is based in Europe, and the service will first launch in Berlin. When I read the article, the thing that caught my attention immediately is the company is using the Dance.CO domain name.
What I did not recall when I read the article is that Mike Mann recently announced that he sold Dance.CO for $58,000 in a July 14th tweet:
10 years ago in June, the late and great Lonnie Borck kicked off the launch of the .CO extension by purchasing e.CO at a charity auction for $81,000. Lonnie didn’t know about the auction until the morning of the event, but he drove to New York City to get together for dinner and ended up winning the domain name and supporting one of his favorite organizations. I remember that day like it was yesterday. Lonnie eventually sold e.CO for an undisclosed amount.
The .CO extension officially launched a month after the auction of e.CO, and the registry is celebrating its ten year birthday this month. Over the years, many startups have used and embraced .CO domain names, and the extension has taken off.
Vito was following the VideoGames.CO auction on Sav.com today, and it closed at $999. Whois records show that VideoGames.CO was created 11 days ago. I assume this is some sort of pending delete auction, although I am not familiar with the auction platform. There were 25 bids from 7 bidders in the auction:
Someone just got a helluva steal in a Dot Co Domain auction I just watched.https://t.co/cVod46Zdeb just sold at only $999!@NameBio reports highest 100 #DotCo DN sales past 2 yrs from 5k up to 85k
I’m not a DotCo investor but Wow, Congrats!#Domains #DomainNames #VideoGames pic.twitter.com/uzHd9gHQW9
— Vito (@VitoDotTV) May 21, 2020
The hot new app being talked about quite a bit in tech circles and on Twitter this weekend is called Byte. Billed by some news outlets as a “successor” to Vine, Byte is a six second short video app that was created by Dom Hofmann, the co-founder of Vine. Interestingly, Byte can be found on the Byte.CO domain name, exactly like Vine was found on another .CO domain name, Vine.CO. Vine was shut down in 2016.
